California To Commission 50 Open Textbooks For 2013; Finnish Teachers Write One In A Weekend

from the just-can't-wait dept

California college students hit with tuition increases in recent years will get a little financial help after Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Thursday to create a website on which popular textbooks can be downloaded for free.

Twin bills by Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) will give students free digital access to 50 core textbooks for lower-division courses offered by the University of California, California State University and California Community College systems. Hard copies of the texts would cost $20.

The bill establishes a new California Open Education Resources Council, which will be required to choose the 50 core textbooks and then:

to establish a competitive request-for-proposal process in which faculty members, publishers, and other interested parties would apply for funds to produce, in 2013, 50 high-quality, affordable, digital open source textbooks

The ripple effect of this legislation should spread way past California and throughout the whole country. With quality publisher-grade peer-reviewed options becoming newly available in open format and competing against the high-priced publishers' textbooks, faculty will need to pause to review these and see how they can be used in their classroom.

After all, if high-quality textbooks are freely available in digital form -- or hence for low prices as printed copies -- hard-pressed universities elsewhere in the US (and internationally) would be crazy not to consider them. The cc-by license means that the text can be freely modified for local needs as necessary, or translated.

A group of Finnish mathematics researchers, teachers and students write an upper secondary mathematics textbook in a booksprint. The event started on Friday 28th September at 9:00 (GMT+3) and the book will be (hopefully) ready on Sunday evening.

Re: I feel a great disturbance in the force...

Me Too !
Finns write Textbook quickly and it will be a decent Textbook for the Children.
Meanwhile in the USA one wonders how long it will take, if whoever writes it will be sued into oblivion, or if some Political Group will Lobby Gov because of its Content (even though it is factual content) .

The world of publishing is cracking and falling about us, great porches and cornices of Atlantean masonry crashing into the sea. "Let... the wide arch / Of the ranged empire fall..." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8WhOOmVOpY

Exciting!

I don't think universities are interested in prolonging the life of expensive textbooks. The faculty are too creative and independent, and very few -- maybe 1 in 1000 -- make enough money from royalties to care about that. The majority are motivated to produce their output not by money but prestige -- the Thorvalds-type energizer of status within a community because of what you contribute. The academic world has already for many years lived and embodied certain Techdirt ideals concerning the form that remuneration might take when the intellectual products themselves are given away for free.

Has Techdirt ever covered the long-standing campaign -- starting with Rob Kirby in Berkeley in the 1990s or even 1980s -- against the high prices and monopoly character of academic journal publishers? When he published a comparison price chart in the AMS Notices, it attracted a lawsuit from the named publishers for price fixing or something like that -- totally bogus and simply a violation of his freedom of speech.

The idea has been around for a long time, but the practical value of classic publishers is large and it only really cracks and crumples when there is new technology. Direct distribution is simply much easier than it was in 1995. Things are really ready to pop.

Dang, I missed it by a year. This time next year I'll be done taking my lower division science course. But I'm always glad to see overpriced textbooks get replaced and the deplorable publishers who make them and their unnecessary new editions see their profits decline.